Sacred Flower Watching Me

Deep in the ground, in the center
of a bulb, in the scarlet
darkness wrapped in crackling

there is a pinprick
of light. It's hot. It stirs. It's spring—
pitiful and sweet as a small girl spanked.

My love, all of it, a life of it, has been
too little. Nor has my rage ever forced any diamonds
out of the blood through the skin.

How awful
resurrection
for someone like me will be. The teenage
girls are being dragged

out of the earth by their hair.

Tongues, testicles, plums, and small hearts bloat
sweetly in the trees. And then

a silence like water
poured into honey—

the silence of middle age.

But there are nights I feel a sacred
flower watching me.
Such affection!
Even in my cradle, it was waiting
warmly, its soft

white gaze

steady on my insufficient face.


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Hardware Store in a Town Without Men

I found myself in a story
without suspense, only
one deaf falcon circling deafly, and that
wild college girl next door

screaming at her mother on the phone.

My heart, a golden lobster, a star
in a grave, some
hot blood running underground . . .

and all my early daydreams loosed
like termites in the walls
of some deserted church.

Oh, I recognized my agony right away.
The howling dog of daylight life, the years of lust
had opened up
a permanent inn for phantoms in my brain.

Then, I turned forty.
Every morning,

sweeping out the shadows
from the cobwebbed corners, raking
the leaves from the gutters,
the hair from the drains . . .


And sleep, the sweet
rolling water of its e’s.
A stroll through the beautiful
ruins of my own dreams.
A hardware store
in a town without men. Whole

shelves devoted to wrenches, gleaming,

and no reason
to lock the door.

No door.


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Message

On the other side of a wall
made of circuits and switches,
I hear my brother’s wife whisper, It’s
her again. Let the machine get it.

But you were the one I wanted, Machine.
You with your little, replaceable parts—
some of them fingers, some of them hearts.
This is a message for you:

It was late, I was lonely, again
I couldn’t sleep. Briefly I remembered being

someone’s little sister. A basketful of apples, fancy
cellophane crackling.

And then I got old
and ugly
and took to drink.

Machine, there is a wolf
full of meaning in my house. She

crouches in the corner. Unseasonably
warm, something
has crawled in on the fur-wet wind, and through
the wire and tin, I hear you humming. You

and your communion of immutable beings

breathing cleanly and listening to me.


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